Ache
by medleypond
Summary: AU: The Weeping Angel was too weak to send Amy back in time, and had to make do with space. Numb from Rory's death, Amy sets off with the Doctor again, and the two of them must understand each other more deeply than ever to reconcile themselves to this new life.
1. Finding Home

The expression on River's face is so much older than he wants it to be, half fond, half weary. "I'll have her write an afterword. For you." He doesn't turn his head as she walks past him, black dress giving a little imperceptible _swish._ He hears her stop at the top of the stairs. "Maybe you'll listen to _her._"

He wants to apologize, but there is no place for the apology to come from. Nevermind the hearts—if you were to rap on his ribcage, _one, two,_ it would ring hollow.

And then a single word gets through to him. _Afterword._

"The last page," he breathes, and then suddenly he's moving, pulling levers, turning switches, and something in his chest is burning again. He needs that piece of paper.

When the TARDIS stops, he wrenches open the door without a thought. For once, he follows his own advice. He's hurtling through the park, faster than he ever knew he could, faster than if any given malicious life-form of the universe were on his heels. He is alive with desperation. _Run._

He reaches the rocks. The picnic basket is still open, something white and helpless and thin fluttering behind the woven frame, sitting at her feet.

His hearts seem to burst into flame, and for a moment he wants to collapse, but there is nothing that will break his fall. So he lurches forward and holds onto the only thing he can, the only thing he wants to.

"Amy," he gasps, breath harsh against the sweetness of her hair. He can't help but grip her tightly, because she's here, Amy, magnificent Pond, in all her solid, fiery-headed and fiery-minded glory, and he has no idea how it's possible.

"I don't understand," she says, in an empty voice.

But he is overflowing. Tears, relief, joy, dread, he doesn't even know. He takes a long, shaky breath and pulls away, trying to steady himself, because he knows that she is going to need him in the next few moments.

"Why aren't I gone?" Her face is still blotchy, the bottoms of her eyes rimmed with black, still as haunted as that moment when she faded into nothingness. He can't help but be glad that it wasn't the last. Her voice becomes insistent, hysterical. "Doctor. Why am I back here? _Why aren't I with him?"_

"The Angel," he says, knowing he has to do this quickly. _Like ripping off a bandage._ "It was a survivor, like I said, but taking Rory must have been the most it could do—it displaced you, yes, but in space, not in time. It was too weak to go very far."

She's quiet for a moment. She still hasn't started crying again. Not yet. She looks up at him. "We can't go get him. 'Cause of the paradox."

"No," he says, as gently as he knows how. She's quiet again. He waits.

And when she finally starts to scream, when she is the one to collapse, he makes sure that he is worth holding on to.

—

Amy expects the return to the house, their house. Amy expects the painful visit to Brian—doesn't want it, dreads it, but she wants this to be done right. She expects the nervous looks the Doctor sends her way when he thinks she's sorting through boxes and pulling photographs out of frames.

She even expects the sunlit afternoon that she gives him a kiss on the cheek and tells him to travel with Melody for a while, trying to ignore the ache in his ancient eyes.

What she doesn't expect is her own ache. It wakes her up in the middle of the night for weeks on end. At the beginning, she recognizes it; it's the kind face in her dreams, the hand groping in the dark for the empty side of the bed that tips her off.

She stays in the house as much as she can, going out where she knows she won't be seen. As far as everyone thinks, she's on holiday. She writes stories, considers sending them to a publishing house, but they always sound too much like the monsters and beauties she's seen in the stars. She grows things: tomatoes, peppers, of course sunflowers—bright things.

But after twenty-one months and twelve days, she wakes to a hammering pulse and the gardens of Appalapachia imprinted on the backs of her eyelids. And she finally knows what the ache means. So this time, it's the phone that she gropes for in the dark, and despite her bleary eyes, she dials the strange combination perfectly.

"Come back, Doctor," she says clearly into the mouthpiece. Her voice echoes in the room. "I'm ready. I'm not okay, but I'm ready."

He still hasn't got the hang of punctuality, because he arrives two weeks later, as she is in the midst of rearranging the boxes.

"Hello, Pond! Got your message—ah." He sees the boxes, and she sees his face fall, just the tiniest bit. "Need some help, I expect?"

His smile is a bit forced, she can tell, so she smiles back reassuringly. "Nope, think I've just about finished, actually."

"Finished?" His brow clears. "Oh, that's what you meant. Ready to move these, I suppose."

"No. Ready to go." He stares at her, still not understanding. She clears her throat. "I'm ready to go. With you."

His gaze jumps from her to the boxes to the pots above the stove. "But… I thought… you were finished with all that. I know you're worried about me being alone, but River's been good to me, I'm perfectly—"

"Doctor, I can't stay here," she interrupts, and her voice breaks right where she doesn't want it to. She breathes deeply, gesturing to the boxes. "What will I tell our friends? What will I tell everyone back in Leadworth? How can I stay here and love someone who died before I was born?"

He leans against the back of the couch. His expression is unfathomable, a single muscle jumping in his jaw. He's silent for a full minute, and when he speaks, his voice is low, gentle, like he's afraid the sound might break her.

"You have to be sure."

"I am."

_"Very _sure, Amy."

"I've had nearly two years, Doctor. I'm sure."

Finally he looks up at her, and the tears in his eyes scare her for just a second. _He's going to say no. He's going to tell me I'm better off here._

He sighs and smiles. "Well, then." He steps across the living room, closing the literal and figurative distance between them, and holds out a hand. His eyes are twinkling now, but it's not the tears.

"Come along, Pond," he whispers.

She laughs, a short, broken sound like a record player skidding off the track, and his arms are suddenly around her. And in the shoulder of that stupid tweed jacket that she's staining, in the warmth of his alien skin, one long finger swiping across her cheek, she knows she won't come back to this house, because she's found at least some semblance of home again.


	2. Whose Fairytale?

**A/N: I got a lot of requests from you guys to make this, which was originally a one-shot, into a full-length fic. I decided to give it a shot and see how it went. Therefore, _your feedback is super important!_ Tell me: do you want more of this as a long fic, or does the first chapter stand best alone? Please let me know—you guys did ask for this!**

* * *

He takes her as far from her memories as he can. Nowhere green and small like Leadworth, nowhere concrete and crowded like New York. It's hard, harder for him than it is for her, because he's constantly racking his brains for every place that could possibly remind her of Rory, constantly charting a course and then scrapping it, constantly glancing over to make sure that tight expression just before crying hasn't taken over her face.

They manage. She loves Azure, with the ground as blue as the sky, and she has him listen to a song on her phone while she whirls around, catching at the blue with her fingertips, singing along.

_I'm blue, da-ba-dee, da-ba-da_

_Da-ba-dee, da-ba-da…_

By the fourth chorus, the tears have come, as he knew they would, and he has to half-carry her back to the TARDIS.

She's quiet. She no longer has fire in her words to match that in her hair; she trails silently behind him at the console, like a shadow. She watches him pull levers and grind egg beaters, and he traces the little furrow between her brows with his eyes, worrying that it may be permanent.

Sometimes, though, she's not silent. Sometimes as she shadows him, she asks questions and points things out, childishly curious. He's more than happy to clarify the backscratcher just above the typewriter, the spinning top that serves as a rough compass if it's fused right. It's moments like these when he sees flashes of his Amelia come through, glimpses of the girl who'd once asked, "If you're a doctor, why does your box say 'police'?" He clutches desperately at those flashes—the flares, as he'd told her not too long ago, before they faded. He explains, gladly, without asking for an explanation himself.

But one night, after a long soirée on Jalian 17 and one too many Star Sanctum cocktails, he finds himself propped up on a chair, eyelids heavy, unable to keep a firm grip on the railing—and it is Amy who stands at the console.

"Wha—what're you doing?" he slurs.

"What does it look like I'm doing?" She flips switches faster than his drink-slowed eyes can take in—one second she's standing with her back to him, then suddenly she's on the other side, pulling the monitor down to squint at it.

"Am—Amelia—you're gonna break it..." He giggles. "You're gonna break my box."

"Hey, moron—I know you're _starry-eyed_ and all, but shut up a sec. I'm trying to set coordinates here."

The order snaps through his haze, and he straightens up, whipping his hand up to a messy salute. "Yes, sir, ma'am!" He pokes himself in the eye. "Ouch!"

"Right, you. To bed."

He stands and points a long finger at her. "I don't _sleep._ Time Lords have no time for sleep, silly Amelia Pond. _You_ sleep, and _I_ come into your dreams." He wiggles his fingers, and then pulls them back abruptly. "_Poof!_ I give you a fairytale. Like your name, remember, Amelia?"

He only knows the pressure around his arm, careful but firm, the force driving him up the stairs, before he finds himself wrapped in something soft and light, his head on a pillow.

"Tonight, the fairytale is yours, raggedy man," comes her whisper, tender and breathy.

And just before the fog of intergalactic drink takes him but just after he feels the gentle imprint of her lips on his forehead, he thinks—or maybe even mumbles—_You've always been mine, Amelia Pond. Just not so's you'd know._


	3. The Morning After

Amy hasn't slept all night. It must have been something in those cocktails—the thing in them that kept her wide awake obviously sent the Doctor for a spin through whatever galaxies he's got twinkling in his head.

She doesn't know how many hours she's been at the console—sitting, standing, pacing, running her fingers over every button and switch. Somewhere in the endless stretch of night, the TARDIS quiet except for the steady hum of engines, she challenged herself to name every odd and end on the switchboard. Needless to say, she couldn't—but she did get halfway round, and half is better than nothing.

"Is that true?" she mutters aloud, half without realizing it. "Really?"

It's obviously not the same—every time she wakes she expects them to be bickering by the console like _they're_ the married couple, her boys, her poncho boys. But there is only ever the Doctor, and as bright and shiny as his disposition usually is, he reminds her without speaking that there can be no Nestene duplicates or reboots of the universe this time.

And the other thing… she still doesn't know if she imagined it or not. The whisper, almost mistakable as a simple breath, half-lost in sleep.

_You've always been mine, Amelia Pond._

It shook her, sure, made her fingertips go hot on her way back to the console room. It's the most selfish thing she's heard him utter, the most possessive she's known him to be. And he's possessive of _her._ Then again, she thinks as she twiddles a dial across space radio for a good morning soundtrack, she can hardly accuse him of that without being hypocritical. How many times has she called him _her_ Doctor? How often has she called out for _her_ raggedy man, believed unshakingly that he would save her?

The station lands on something that corresponds to what Amy imagines an octopus would sound like if it could sing. (And who knows, she reminds herself, maybe there's somewhere she hasn't been yet where they do.) Sitting down—and resolving to stay that way, at least for a little while—she can't help but wonder if he's right. Somehow, every time she's thought he was on his way out, or she was, something would happen to bring them back together again. Even the graveyard. For all her adventures with the Doctor, for every year she's spent at his side watching time get out of hand and science do things she could never explain, sometimes she can't help thinking whether such a thing as fate can qualify as "timey-wimey-spacey-wacey"; whether it's not a coincidence that the Doctor, even a wanderer like him, could become such a permanent fixture in her life, no matter the obstacles the universe seems to throw at them.

There are gentle footsteps behind her, and quiet as the sound is, the sound makes her jump. The throaty chuckle that follows makes her turn.

Funny enough, it's not the disheveled clothes that throw her off, or even the way his hair is sticking up in front. It's the five o'clock shadow that gets her giggling.

"Yeah, you don't look great yourself, Pond," he growls, gesturing to his face. "Looks like you got punched in the eye. Both eyes."

She decides to write off the comment as morning grogginess, though she can't brush off the pang of self-consciousness that it sets off. She raises an eyebrow. "You've got scruff."

He runs a hand along his cheek, but doesn't seem fazed. "Yeah? So?"

"So, you're a five year old." The laughter is creeping back into her voice. "How can a five year old have scruff?"

"You act like Time Lords aren't a humanoid race," he grumbles. "Yes, we've got to shave."

"Go do that, then. We've got a busy day ahead." She gives him a light punch in the arm as she passes him on her way to the stairs.

He catches her arm as she passes. "Amelia. Amy." She looks back expectantly, though something strange is stirring in her chest as she watches him fumble for words. He looks up. "Last night. You piloted the TARDIS."

"Yep."

"You put me to bed."

"Yep."

He uses his other hand to gesture vaguely, his expression looking almost comically baffled. "How do either of those things make any sense?"

She snorts, shoving him away. "As usual, you give me no credit at all. You're the one who taught me, stupid, did you think I wouldn't remember what you said?"

"I thought you were just curious," he says, and she's surprised to note the honest confusion on his face—he really didn't think she was listening. In a way, she expects it. He's always had this bit to show off, to dangle in front of her nose; ha-ha, Amy doesn't know how to work the TARDIS or find anything, let me flip three switches and have us shoot off across four galaxies.

"How did you know where my room was?" he asks, still looking like a hurt puppy dog.

"I didn't," she says truthfully. "You led me there. You were thankfully still standing at that point."

"Oh." There's quiet between them for a moment, and Amy becomes aware that his hand has slipped down her arm to lock around her wrist, his long, tapered fingers wrapped gently around. It seems he realizes at the same time she does, because he lets go and runs a hand through his hair. "So, er—what coordinates did you set?"

She clears her throat, clearing the air between them in the process. "Paris. Fifty-second century. I thought a good, strong coffee might be a good idea." She wiggles her eyebrows.

"Coffee's rubbish in the fifty-second," he mutters, pushing past her. "Fifty-third. The half-digested bean fad has gone out by then."

Amy has to stop herself from making a retching sound. "Half-digested—?"

"The fools thought it would be like the birds on Earth do for their young, you know, easier to swallow in the morning, forget the taste." Something about the way his eyes jump around the room suddenly makes her not quite ready to believe him. He moves toward the console. "I'll just tweak the numbers a bit."

"You're not going out like that," she warns him, "no matter what century."

He waves a hand behind him impatiently. "I'll be dressed before you, Pond, that's a promise."

She smiles, but a twinge starts in her ribcage, watching him there at the console. She almost wants to challenge him, ask him to tell her more about the half-digestion nonsense, but she knows what he's trying to do. She wouldn't forgive herself if she took away the one thing he feels he can control.

So she turns her back on him and tries to think of nothing but what the TARDIS' wardrobe will offer her for today.

She still can't stop herself from glancing back before going down the hallway—he's stopped touching anything, just leaning over the console, head hung low. She wants so desperately to go back and shake him by the shoulders, or get a laugh out of him—she stops right there. She learned early and well not to force him out of his head.

_He'll come around_, she tells herself as she throws open the door to the wardrobe and finds a sheath the color of leaves just before they change, perfect to bring out the green in her eyes, accompanied by a pair of black velvety pumps. She closes her eyes. _He will._


	4. Hunger

Paris in the fifty-third century is, in a word, shiny. Not Times Square shiny—there's a dull sort of jolt in the Doctor's chest as he thinks it—but a glow that seems to emanate from the inside out. The pavements gleam with night-old rain, the strange curlicued street orbs still lit in the cloudy murk of morning.

The Doctor dismisses the first two cafés they pass, but recognizes the third and strides in, ready with a bright _"Bonjour!"_ He gets a surprise when, less than a minute later, he's thrown unceremoniously from the place.

"Forgot about the maître d'," he mutters to Amy in explanation. "His lady friend, she, er… she followed me out the last time I was here. Got rather the wrong impression, I think." He winces, rubbing his neck where the waiter grabbed him.

Amy's trying not to laugh, and she wiggles her eyebrows at him. "Oh. So you didn't—?"

He stares at her, horrified. "No! She was missing teeth!"

Amy snorts with laughter, but there's a strange sort of smugness in her expression that throws him off for a second. He knows it should annoy him, but he's the farthest thing from it. In fact, he's almost… pleased.

All morning, he's been worried about last night, and what he did in his drunken stupor, but Amy hasn't said anything. He doesn't know if it's because he dreamed the words or because she just wrote it off as drunk talk.

_You've always been mine, Amelia Pond._

Maybe she has, he muses, watching her saunter down the street ahead of him. A decade of her life, more than three hundred years of his… it's been a long time. He can't help thinking back to the snappy Scottish girl who'd told him about the four psychiatrists she'd bitten, just for telling her he, the Doctor, wasn't real. Involuntarily, his eyes travel down her frame, settling inevitably on her endless legs. They seem to stretch into oblivion between her pumps and the hem of her sheath, which is deliciously short. They're certainly a nicer sight than those of the maître d's madam, who turned out to be somewhat of an exhibitionist.

He shakes his head to clear it. _Stop it. Dirty old alien. Think of Rory._

_Rory's gone, _says a nasty little voice in his head. _Has been for years now._ It sounds unpleasantly familiar. It sounds like a little man in a fedora and a checkered suit— _The only person who hates me as much as I do._

_Not so many years,_ he argues back. He smiles automatically as Amy turns to urge him along, her smile creasing the edges of her eyelids.

How old is she now? Thirty-two? Thirty-three? He can't pretend he's not able to tell, the way she can lose and gain years in the span of a few moments, especially if she's deep in thought.

He wonders if this is their fate. Amy Pond and the Doctor, floating across centuries and galaxies together, two children at first glance but with that ancient ache behind their respective gazes of green and hazel.

And then, just as he thinks it, Amy whirls around, her fiery hair vibrant and in furious motion against Paris's still gray backdrop.

"I just remembered. Paris—they've got to have crêpes somewhere, right? Even in the fifty-third century?"

It takes him a moment to process the question. "Crêpes. Right. Yeah." Recovering, he makes a face at her. "All stomach and eyes today, aren't you, Pond?"

She rolls her eyes. "Yeah, well, all chin and no eyebrows, _you_ are, and that's _all_ the time."

He catches up to her and furiously musses her hair—half out of fun and half to catch the soft ginger tresses between his fingers. Amy smells like rain and sugar, and her laugh is even sweeter.

* * *

They do finally find coffee, and crêpes. There isn't the simple sugar and lemon that Amy's used to, though, so the Doctor recommends a couple of flavors. He doesn't get anything.

"Sometimes," she manages later through a mouthful of some kind of savory mix that even he doesn't recognize, "I wonder how you're still standing." She looks meaningfully at his empty place at the table.

"I _eat_," he replies disdainfully. "I'm just not hungry." He looks at the crêpe in distaste. "Especially not for _that_."

She gives him a look of outrage. "_You _told me to get it!"

He sticks out his tongue. "And _you're_ Scottish! You came up with _haggis!"_

"Don't you hate on the haggis," she threatens, pointing her fork menacingly at him. She takes up another mouthful without a second thought. "Aunt Sharon used to try and make it for me once. Make me feel at home, I s'pose." She grinned. "Guess how many people called the fire department for that one?"

He chuckles and just watches her for a moment. She's no dainty eater, but he can't blame her—she's been on her feet all night, hasn't slept or eaten, and she's, well—human. Sometimes, strange as it seems, he wishes he could be hungry. Physically hungry, with a rumble in his belly, some way to physicalize the twinge in his chest. It gnaws at him when he's concentrating on refusing TARDIS wires, or in the middle of a guided tour across Kaplan-24.

It _is_ hunger, he supposes, but not the kind so easily satisfied by a crêpe or a cup of coffee. And what for, well, he's never quite sure.

"Sure you don't want a bite?" He comes back to the present. She's looking at him intently, and he realizes he's been staring down at her plate, lost in thought.

He searches for words for a few moments, and then smiles up at her. "I'm not hungry."


	5. Tinkering with Time

**A/N: Sorry this took so long; I've been super busy with finals and stuck on where to take this story. I've finally worked out some things, so here is an extra-long chapter to make up for it! And thank you for being so enthusiastic so early in the story; you guys and your reviews are what keep me going! Enjoy the immense suspense/angst and River's first appearance! Woop.**

* * *

He starts sleeping.

He doesn't quite know what to make of it at first; one moment he's commandeering a carousel because Amy wants the giraffe on the top level, and the next he's slumped over the desk of his study, one of his many trinkets loosely clutched between his fingers. It's not narcolepsy, but it seems to him it comes on just as suddenly, when he's not expecting it.

He didn't really expect it at all in the first place, but there it is.

Amy notices; she catches his yawns, the mussed-up tie she automatically has to reach out and fix. "So, the Time Lord's finally found his bedtime," she teases, and he waves her away, running a hand self-consciously through his hair. Something silly like sleep can't be changing him that much, can it?

But he starts to notice things, too, things about himself; it's like that phenomenon humans talk about—an out-of-body experience? Yes, that's it. He feels as though he's standing outside himself, watching this gangly child in grownups' clothes prance about the TARDIS, glance nervously at Amy, let her lead him to somewhere she's chosen—and she seems to be doing that more often, now, and the funny thing is that he lets her. He never did that before. He was always at the front in their constant game of Follow the Leader, proud as a primary schooler showing off his crayon drawings; but it seems Amy's caught up, passed him, taking his hand instead of the other way around.

The difference is that in place of scribbles, she gives him afternoons doused in Gremmor's purple sunlight, mornings spent in silence watching the local wildlife feed off the luminescent surface of the Crystalline Lakes—and some nights where they do nothing at all. Sometimes he's sitting in the belly of the TARDIS on his swing twisted from pipes and wires, and she just ducks into the eerily lit space and sits down on the ground next to him. She doesn't watch him, just leans up against his knee as he fiddles with a bolt or two.

More than once the warmth of her back, the gentle swish of her hair, has made him reroute the wrong circuits. Sometimes they're just showered with sparks; sometimes the TARDIS nearly does a barrel roll, spitting steam at him like an angry cat whose tail has been pulled. Indeed, he can't help muttering an embarrassed "Sorry" when he does butcher it.

But on a night about a month after Paris—that's another change, keeping time—things seem normal, familiar. He's chosen the venue this time: stargazing on the lawns of the Royal Garden on Chimeria. He's even feeling the old pride, because the look in Amy's eyes as the meteors exploded in them was nothing short of awed.

"Back in a mo'," he calls as he skips up the stairs ahead of her. "Have to figure out where this came from—" He holds up the picnic basket they brought along, and indeed, he can't remember what corner of the TARDIS it sprung from. He spins around and points a warning finger at her. "So don't touch anything!"

"Yessir, captain," she says, yawning and dropping into the seat nearest the console.

Humming, he flicks his eyes from door to door as he goes down the hallway, none of them looking particularly familiar—then again, they never really do. He opens a red door that houses a few dusty-looking coils of rope, and a second metal one that gives way to a solid block of wall. _Third time's the charm, or whatever it is._ And so it is; there's the polished door to the study, and though he knows it's not where the basket goes, the thought of his familiar cluttered array of simple stuff and things draws him in.

That is, until he glimpses the shadow moving across the bottom crack of the door.

It takes him all of a second to move, as if he's flipped a switch somewhere between the two hearts speeding away in his chest. How could someone have gotten in? He practically throws himself against the wall, lowering the basket to the floor and taking the sonic from the inside pocket of his jacket. He counts. _Three, two…_ He stops breathing. _One._

He kicks the door in with a crash, immediately retreating to the cover of the wall in case of firepower. But no shots come, no harsh alien voice demanding something. No, instead there's a deep, throaty laugh.

"Bit late for melodramatics, sweetie. I heard you halfway down the corridor."

Immediately his pulse slows; letting out a breath, he picks up the basket and steps into the doorway.

River stands by one of his tables, rocking a silvery instrument idly back and forth in her hands. She's smiling in a way he doesn't like at all. "Humming now? What's next, Gallifreyan opera?"

"Not unless I want to crack Amy's head open with the decibel level," he replies, and though he's trying not to smile, he does anyway. So does she, wider. Still, he can't shake the uneasiness that comes with her visits. "River, what are you doing here?"

She shrugs, setting the silvery thing down on its table. "I don't know. We never really do, do we, you and I? You'd think the little blue book would help, but it doesn't, not always."

The way she's avoiding the question puts him even more on edge. River's evasive, but not like this, never so showy in the way she encrypts her words. It's almost as if she wants him to understand this time.

"I've done something, haven't I?" he says finally, setting the basket down by one of the armoires. "Something I don't know about yet."

She sighs. "Sometimes I wish you were as young as you look. You wouldn't be as sharp."

He pauses; something's still not right. "But—why come and tell me? Isn't the point to just let me figure it out when the time comes? Let it happen?" He looks up at her with a reluctant smile. "Or are you coming to scold me in advance?"

Where he's expecting some sort of innuendo comes none. Something is very, very wrong; he can see it in the creases below her eyes, the twisting of her fingers.

"I love you," says River after a few beats. "Very much, darling. You know that."

How could he not? In an alternate world, she summoned half the universe to stop him from using his life as a reboot chip.

"And I know you've never loved me as much as I love you," River goes on, her gaze turned unnervingly down. "But if you care at all, you'll promise me to never be anything more or less than what you are."

He stares at her. She's speaking almost in poetry, and the sound of the words distracts him from what they might mean strung together; this is another River, another woman behind these anxious eyes. For one blinding, furious moment, he hates himself—what has he done, sometime in his future, to make her so sad, so afraid?

"I don't understand," he says, and it sounds stupid even to his own ears.

"Of course you don't," she says, her voice thick as she shakes her head and smiles tightly.

"You're trying to change something." He realizes it a moment before he says it. He lowers his voice and looks at her intently. "River. You know you can't. You _shouldn't._ If something changes, if I don't do whatever it is I've done, the consequences could be…" He struggles to find a word that can encompass the utter devastation that meddling with time can spawn.

"I know." She shakes her head again. "But this is important. This is about Amy, too."

Of course it is. He should've known from the worry in her brows, the desperation—it's always Amy, caught in the whirlwind of time and space. The girl who didn't make sense. Mad, impossible Amy Pond.

"Fight it," says River, with more force than he's heard from her in a long time.

"What?" As if he'll get a straight answer.

"You'll know when it comes. Fight it, Doctor. Or you'll both be in over your heads." She smooths the front of her skirt—the same honey color as her hair, he notices—takes a deep breath, and looks up. He knows from the blank calm in her features that the moment is over. "I just had to get that out." She smiles, if a little dully. "Now, love, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to pop down and pay dear old Mum a quick visit before I go."

He doesn't move, even as she approaches the doorway; she does pause, leaning to brush a kiss against his cheek. "Cheer up, darling. If I know one thing about my mother, it's that she doesn't like to be controlled. Especially not by a silly old time stream."

He smiles, but it's an automatic reaction. She doesn't press him, though, and he doesn't say goodbye as the sound of her clacking boots fades away down the corridor. He knows, too, that the message was for him and him alone—the love, the banter, is reserved for Amy tonight.

He feels like that gangly boy again, except this time it's as if he's been made to stand and face the corner. He can almost see River in a schoolmarm's uniform, chiding, _Now, think about what you did._

"How can I?" he mutters to no one in particular, rubbing his eyes. Suddenly, he's very, very tired, and for the first time, he actually longs for sleep.

He leaves the study without taking the basket. Tonight is not a night for tinkering.

* * *

Amy sleeps less. Not out of unrest or anxiety—she just seems to _need_ less, her stamina at a level she hasn't felt for years. She can't tell what it is, but as time passes she goes to bed later and rises earlier; it might be the TARDIS throwing her off, but she's not so sure. There are only a few hours in the day—if she can even call it that, given that she rarely keeps track—that she isn't within sight or reaching distance of the Doctor.

He even makes his way into her dreams. While the fact in itself isn't surprising, it's the kind of Doctor she sees in the fog behind her eyelids that surprises her. His eyes always seem to gleam, his laugh impish, his face—no other word for it—younger. When she wakes, her chest seizes up painfully, and she can't help trying to grasp for the floppy-haired teenager of the cosmos still lurking in her consciousness.

The dreams only emphasize how wistful her reality feels, how she and the Doctor have somehow managed to both step away from each other and pull each other closer than ever. Sometimes the TARDIS almost feels claustrophobic—but she's never sure whether it's the loneliness or the things unsaid that eat up the air between them.

One night she finds herself slumped in a chair by the console, chin on her chest, visions of exploding stars and laughing creatures—she's seen too much of the universe to call them fairies—still flashing across her eyes. It takes her a few moments of stretching and yawning to realize she's alone.

"Doctor?" she calls, wincing at how loud her own voice sounds in the wide space. There is no answer, but she can't exactly say she was expecting one, even if he did say he'd be back. It's the time of night when he buries himself in the workings of the TARDIS, in rooms even Amy, after years, doesn't know the way into.

Shrugging at no one in particular, she stands and stretches again to loosen the tension in her back. As she does, a familiar figure with wild hair appears at the top of the stairs.

"Melody?" Amy hasn't been able to call her anything else since the graveyard.

"Hello, Mummy." River's voice is teasing as she comes down the stairs, but only gently so. River smiles as she approaches the console. "Long night?"

Amy can't help but marvel that despite facts, her daughter will always be older than her in ways she can't quite quantify.

She shakes her head experimentally to get herself fully awake. "I didn't think it would be, but one minute we were watching the star shower and the next I'm sitting here"—she gestures to the chair—"practically drooling on myself." She glances at River. "Where is he, anyway?"

River lifts her shoulder nonchalantly. "Oh, in the study. He's a tinkerer by nature. You know."

"No, I don't know," Amy murmurs. She hates to admit it, and for the first time in years, she feels something hot and dry and unfortunately familiar spread in her throat. She can't look her daughter in the eye, so she clears her throat. "So, what are you doing here? Not that I'm not happy to see you," she adds hastily, "but you—"

"I'm not exactly a harbinger of joy, yes," River finishes, smiling a little ruefully. "Sorry about that. But I'm just dropping in. Checking in on you two."

River has been the mystery woman for as long as Amy has known her, but there are some things that even she can't hide. _A mother knows._ Amy levels an intent look at her. "Is that all?"

River's smile fades, and her expression takes on an unfathomable quality. "Would you do me a favor?"

"I s'pose."

"Don't take care of him. The Doctor. There's a time coming when he's going to need to stand on his own two feet."

Amy stares at her. The obscurity is a matter of course now, nothing new, but something about it feels different this time. Urgent, or ominous, even.

"So what, no mothering?" she jokes, partly to relieve the uncomfortable twisting in her chest. "No meals and fixing his clothes and tucking him in and the like?"

"Exactly."

That was not the answer she'd expected, and for a few moments she's good and well struck dumb. If Melody, the sharp-tongued queen of wit, has no retort, then she's—the horror of thinking it—serious.

"Um. Okay," she says slowly, still searching River's eyes for an answer she knows will stay hidden.

The dent between River's eyes deepens. "Promise me, Amy."

Amy can't help giving a chuckle, even if the sound comes out nervous. "Isn't it children who are supposed to make promises to their parents, not the other way round?"

River gave her another incomprehensible look.

Amy sighs. "Melody, this makes no sense. And you should know better than anyone promises don't make much difference, not in a life like this." She looks at her daughter earnestly. "I know you're looking out for me, but whatever it is that happens in my future—our future," she corrects, "is gonna happen. Remember what happened the last time you tried to mess with time?"

River looks uneasy, and the expression almost looks wrong on her features. "Mother—"

"Melody," says Amy firmly. She raises an eyebrow. "Are you going to tell your mother what to do now?"

River seems to hesitate, then breaks into a smile, if a somewhat reluctant one. She reaches out and pats Amy's shoulder. "Be careful, then."

For a moment, they mirror each other—with River's hand gripping her shoulder, Amy feels suddenly very small and unsure. Each time she thinks she's gotten used to meeting her daughter at these strange intervals, it seems some things never change. Sometimes she feels she's still just Amelia Pond from Leadworth, and that she'll never be anything else.

She swallows. "Look after you." With just three words, that bright afternoon in the street, her arms wrapped around the Doctor's thin shoulders, floats into her head. As she knew it would.

And then in a moment, River is back to being River, smiling knowingly as if she can see into Amy's memories. She gives her mother's shoulder a last squeeze before stepping back.

"You did drool, by the way," she says, pointing to Amy's shirt front. In the time Amy looks down at the slight stain, there's a sharp _zap_; when she looks up again, River is gone.

Amy's torn between wanting to smile and wanting to bloody her knuckles against the sharp ridges of the console.


	6. Balbella Blues

River's visit puts them both off for the next couple of days. Amy finds herself circling the Doctor like a wary animal sometimes, trying to see past the tweed and the floppy hair and the ancient eyes to whatever it is that her daughter saw. That _she_ hasn't yet. And she can see the same sort of curiosity in his eyes, and wonders what River said to him, what sort of warning she gave — were they about her, about Amy?

What is so dangerous about the two of them in the future?

Maybe because of River, maybe just because, they go. Far. He takes them to countries and planets in the farthest reaches of the cosmos, things more fantastical than Amy could ever have imagined (and that's saying something, given how much she's seen with him). They eat at a restaurant perched atop the backs of creatures moving across strangely colored grasslands; they go bobsledding down a mountain covered not in ice but in a cottony plant substance, like the fake snow in the department store holiday displays back home.

It hurts sometimes, to think of that. To think of "back home". But Amy's got it down to a science now; she can turn off thoughts like that, of home and Earth and little normal things, like there's a switch for them.

Mostly, anyway.

They go spelunking in the famous (not so famous, Amy argues, if she's got no idea what they are) Choir Caves of Balbella — they're supposed to sing when you touch a stalagmite, or a wall, but by the fifth time she's rapped on a nearby slab, Amy's getting impatient.

"Oh, come on."

"Just listen!"

"I don't hear anything!" she whines, immediately regretting the tone of her voice.

"You're not exactly being polite," he calls over his shoulder, already a couple of hundred feet ahead. She can hear the faint buzz of his screwdriver. "They don't like to be attacked."

She snorts, and it sounds like a small explosion thanks to the echo. "They don't _like_ it? So the walls can hear me now?"

"Why do you think people say walls have ears? Eh?"

It's a fair point, but she's not quite sure she believes him—partly because he sounds entirely too pleased at her disbelief. This is that delicious moment of uncertainty she knows so well, when he hands her something beautiful and unbelievable on a platter and she rocks between indulging in it like a dessert or sticking to her humanity.

She always loses.

"Am I supposed to say please or something?"

A chuckle starts up ahead and comes back to her in waves, the sound bouncing off the strange topography of the walls. "Wouldn't hurt. But I'd lay off the slapping, too. Easy does it, Pond."

Easy is not her, she thinks, letting out a sigh. They both know that. In the odd silence-that-is-not-silence that stretches around her — because she can hear a faint _drip drip drip_ somewhere and the Doctor's footsteps and mutterings — she takes a deep breath, trying to steady her own restlessness.

She can't help but smile; suddenly she's hit by the gentle perfection of it all. It's as if she's nineteen again, trailing after this awkward giraffe of an alien boy, watching him trip over galaxies and stalagmites and his own feet.

Maybe easy is a good idea. Maybe the Doctor's _full-steam-ahead_ warrants a _whoa-there_ to counter it.

She breathes. Quietly, in through the mouth, out through the nose, like they taught at the yoga sessions she used to take in London. _Why are you thinking of that crap now? _She tries again. In through the mouth. Out through the nose. The sounds of the cave, subtle as they are, amplify around the sound of her own heartbeat.

She reaches out, forcing herself to slow the motion, and touches a single finger pad to the cold, colorless rock.

A sound she can only describe as a hum emits from the wall, and she withdraws it as quickly as if she's been burnt.

But the sound doesn't stop. It lingers, seeming to fan out from the place where she touched the wall and overlapping, rippling, the same note folding over itself and strengthening. Something strange starts to stir in Amy's belly, strange but familiar all at once. She can't stop herself from looking around, up, taking in the entirety of the cave that she can see and drinking in the sound, the sound, because it feels as though it'll swallow her whole.

There is an eerie beauty to it, to something that refuses to be put into words or pictures or even thoughts — Amy knows only the sound, and the feeling, as she touches her fingers lightly to the walls one by one like a beginner pianist and the notes swell above.

"I told you."

For some reason she doesn't start, though under any other circumstances she would. It makes some sort of sense for him to be standing there at her shoulder. She looks over at him; she can just see the endearing way his faint brows are dented in the center. He glances at her and she could swear his grin lights up the cave, even more than their tiny pen lamps, as he mouths something to her. She knows what it is even as the ethereal chords of the caves rise around them.

_Easy does it._

When she slips her hand into his he stiffens, but only just, and it doesn't take long for her to feel the returning pressure. His hand is warm, odd given where they are and his alienness, but she's not complaining.

Maybe this is how everyone sees him, she muses. They must all just be half in the dark, because with his eyes raised to the music, with a lock of hair dangling over his forehead… he looks so gentle, so hopeful. So _human._ And the warmth of his hand, how firmly and gently he can hold hers all at once, wouldn't say otherwise. It's so easy to believe they are of the same kind, the two of them.

And just then, like a fellow driver on the freeway, he seems to sense her gaze and meets it. It's as if someone has lit a match — his green set her hazel aflame and she can't look away. The cave is living up to its name and it seems something in Amy's ribcage is following suit — the humming is all over her body, spreading out across her chest and down her spine and winding down along her wrists. She is hot and cold, her stomach dropping to her feet. She is singing without opening her mouth or using her vocal cords.

"Amy?" he says, and the way he says it, dark and a little bit unsteady, is like a gentle hand plucking at her like a harp. She has to swallow hard to keep from shivering.

The caves are starting to subside. The hum fades to a sort of murmur and then quieter still, so that half of the sound is really only in Amy's head, echoing, echoing. And still they're looking at each other and not around the cave — and somehow that is entirely right.

"Yeah?" she whispers. Waits.

But the renewed silence seems to have broken whatever had passed between them, because he looks away. "I—" Carefully, but nonetheless steadily, he extracts his hand from hers. "Nevermind." He claps his hands and clears his throat. "Reckon we could get somewhat of an orchestra in one of the bigger openings. That was… something, wasn't it?" His smile is there, but fleeting, and once he's turned his back she knows there is no chance to get back whatever it was.

"Yeah…" She clears her throat, too, but it scratches a little. "Something."

She stands there alone in the now-silent cave for a few moments more, even though there isn't really anything to _see,_ as the Doctor's jabberings lead up ahead.

Finally she takes another breath, the chilly cave air seeming to freeze her insides on the way down, and sets off again.

It's only after wandering a few hundred yards in that she realizes the Doctor's chatter has faded completely.

"Doctor?" _Drip, drip_. No Doctor.

"Doctor?" _-octor-octor-octor?_ All of a sudden she hates the echo, hates the cave for mocking her and throwing the panic in her own voice back at her.

She shouts again, and again, her throat starting to scratch, and all she can think of is how warm he was standing next to her and how cold it suddenly is.

Her arms erupt in goosebumps, her chest feeling hollow.

So cold.

* * *

**A/N:** I know it's been a long time. I could cite any number of excuses, but just believe me when I say I've been incredibly busy and unable to update.

I hope you guys haven't given up on me or this story, because it's about to get dark and a little bit wild, as you can tell from this chapter.

I do appreciate all of you who have been asking for updates. It's really nice to know people are still interested! And remember, reviews are my bread and butter :)


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